Street smart

India's version of ghetto rap is gully rap, making a stinging statement in back alleys marked by hardship, poverty, illiteracy, drugs and crime.

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Moeena Halim

March 16, 2016

ISSUE DATE: March 28, 2016

UPDATED: March 18, 2016 11:21 IST

South Dandies Swaraj. Photo: Danesh Jassawala

Dressed in baggy pants, a sweatshirt, sunglasses and a pair of neon sneakers, Naved Sheikh sticks out like a sore thumb in his "hateli ilaka" (strange neighbourhood) at Kurla West, or Bombay 70. Like several of his neighbours, his family is "kattar" (orthodox) Muslim, but it's a rapper cap that replaces the skull cap on Sheikh's head. With a wardrobe stocked up from Colaba Causeway, the young man dresses like a rapper and has a motormouth to match. When he took the stage at Blue Frog, a performance club in Mumbai, for the first time in August 2015, he was welcomed with a girl screaming "we love you Naved." No one is more surprised than he is. "Ek number," he responds and the crowd is already won over.

His story is the stuff Bollywood films are made of, but there's little room for babes, bitches or sunny days on beaches. Misogyny a la Honey Singh? No thank you. Kurla, where Sheikh has spent all of his 22 years, is riddled with problems of illiteracy, crime, police brutality and poverty, and that's what inspires most of his rap songs. So if Singh is Bollywood's response to Lil Wayne, it's Kendrick Lamar and Tupac Shakur that Naezy (short for Naved is crazy) looks up to. And if Dear Mama tells Tupac's tale, Aafat! is Sheikh's story. The introductory verse talks about his upbringing in the khatarnaak neighbourhood and the khatri gangs that run it. He might mention drugs and crime, but gangsta rap isn't exactly what he is going for. The genre popularised by Tupac and Snoop Dogg has been criticised for glamourising the 'thug life', encouraging violence, hypersexuality and drugs, but Sheikh only hopes to highlight the problems that already exist in the gullies and ghettos of Bombay 70.

Sounds from the streetsIt is a sentiment that resonates in the growing underground rap scene across the country. Mumbai alone is home to a large number of rappers who sing about what they see and know in a language that is their own. Conscious of their surroundings, they colour their songs with the issues of a fractured society in the slang of their streets. It's a style under development. Let's call it gully rap.

Naezy. Photo: Danesh Jassawala

Meri Gully Mein, a Naezy collaboration with Vivian Divine aka Divine which has over 4 lakh views on YouTube, is a sign that the genre is inching towards the mainstream. Just like Sheikh and Divine, who grew up in the drug-addled slum near Sahar airport in Mumbai, crew members of the Swadeshi group also emerge from neighbourhoods neglected by bureaucrats, targeted by the police. Deeply influenced by rappers from the West, this lot expresses an embarrassment towards mainstream 'desi rappers'.

Aspiring engineer and musician, 22-year-old Rounok Chakraborty aka Cizzy has been trying to bring the movement to the streets of Kolkata too. Under the Cypher Projekt, he and his crewmates have been organising get-togethers and cypher sessions in the city. "I wanted to get all the hip hop artistes together in one 'hood," says Chakraborty. "Perhaps because of the skill required, b-boying and dancing is still much more popular than rapping," he observes. But there is one passionate 25-year-old who would travel nearly 200 km by bus from small town Asansol to participate in the Sunday cyphers. It was at these get-togethers that Bhaskar Mandal aka BBuzz realised there was more to rap than what one would see in Bollywood. He now writes about politics, freedom of speech and corruption in Bengali and is working on creating videos for the songs he has written.

"This culture in which rappers have realised that they don't need to mimic the West but rap in their own language is heartening. They're doing it pretty well. India with its varied languages can become one of the best places to spread this culture," believes Vineet Nair. Rapping under the alias Poetik Justis, the 22-year-old has been part of the Dharavi crew Slumgods, which is believed to be the first hip hop collective movement in the city, and has recently launched his multilingual album Greatness.

Rappers with a causeIt isn't surprising that Dharavi has been nurturing a hip hop scene for a while. If Mumbai can be compared to New York, Dharavi bears a certain likeness to the Bronx. "Hip hop culture helped bring considerable change in the Bronx, which was once a neighbourhood riddled with poverty, crime, drugs and violence. This culture brought a change to Black Americans living there. They believed they could earn dignity and respect through hip hop, whether it was through graffiti art, b-boying, MCing or rapping," notes Dharavi-based Suresh Agalian Bose aka Sean YKV. The 26-year-old rapper, along with Ranjit Shankar aka Kushmir and Rahul Prasad aka Tamil, forms the rap crew South Dandies Swaraj. "As the young generation in India, we need to maintain our tradition and dignity and keep our music as real and ethnic as possible," says Bose. His very first rap song was based on the practices of recycling in Dharavi. "Whether it is the Nirbhaya rape case, issues of corruption or violence, I collect stories, find out all that happened and then pen down my thoughts on it," says Bose. Far from falling prey to misogyny, Bose's respect for women extends to apologising even for the mere mention of the word 'bitch'.

Divine

Too busy surviving life in Andheri's BD chawl, suffering the daily brunt of local train travel, singing about 'chaar bottle vodka' seems unthinkable to Dharmesh Parmar aka MC Todfod. The 18-year-old, who raps in Gujarati, lives in a building that housed jailed revolutionaries during the British Raj. He sees himself as a krantikaari (revolutionary) too. Whether or not he can change policies, he hopes he can change mindsets. Along with Marathi rapper Aklesh Sutar aka MC Mawali, whose solo Laaj Watte Kai, urged society to feel the shame for the Nirbhaya rape case, Parmar is part of the Swadeshi crew.

The South Dandies Swaraj are just as keen to make a change with their rap music. Their latest song Kacheri Vibe talks of the hardships of the farmers in Bose's native Tirunelveli. "As a musician it is my responsibility to do something for my people. But real change can happen only when our songs reach the mainstream. Which is what happened with the African-Americans," says Bose.

Rap, rage and rebellionThe country has not been a complete stranger to this kind of hyper-regional rap. Remember how Javed Jaffrey as Mum-bhai claimed that Mumbai was 'ekdum danger place', just like Sheikh declares Kurla to be 'khatarnaak'? The song, written and performed by Jaffrey, was considered so cool it got the country flaunting Bombay slang. Ask him to narrate some of the problems he faces and he tells a story instead. "I lost a friend recently," he begins. "He is in jail for murdering someone. He was so influenced by gangster films that he wanted to be a 'bhai' and started dealing drugs. We were barely 17 years old. He got into a fight with some powerful people." Running into a wedding mandap, his friend lifted a bamboo to defend himself and ended up hitting one of the guys with it. He died on the spot and Sheikh's friend was thrown into jail. "This is just an example of the kind of things that happen with people in my neighbourhood. There are lots of people whose future has been ruined even though they come from a good family. It's a good thing I found music at the right time, otherwise who knows what I would have been involved in. There are a lot of 'khatri' gangs there," says Sheikh candidly.

His family although happy that he is no longer involved in petty crime, is not particularly supportive of his musical career. "It is considered haraam in Islam and it doesn't matter that I am now earning a living. They won't even eat the apples I buy from the money I make from music," he rues. But this is not going to stop Sheikh from pursuing his passion. He knows how to get his way. Even as a child in school, he would manage to cut classes and find his way to a river in Khadavli 80 to 90 km away just to take a dip in the water. "I'd go on Fridays so that the teacher would forget over the weekend and not bother to ask me where I was," he says. As a 22-year-old, he finds a way to lie to his family when he goes on tour and hunts for quiet spots in the rail yards or empty rickshaws to write his songs.

Follow the writer on Twitter @moeenah

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